My name is Cameron Bravo

This is a picture of me hanging out with some friends of mine in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. I am a 23 year old physics and mathematics major. I have lived in Switzerland for about 16 months working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). This is one of the two big experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Most people recognize this as the giant machine in Switzerland that is going to make a blackhole and implode the world. I spent most of my time working at the Paul Scherrer Institute, the Swiss national lab, just outside of Zürich. I did get to live at CERN for 5 weeks over the summer of 2012.

 I grew up in Raymore, MO, a suburb of Kansas City. This is my first online course, and I would guess will be my only. Intercultural communication is very important in the field of study I am interested in. CERN is possibly one of the largest and most important social and cultural experiments in the world today. While living there I was able to meet people from everywhere in the world. Seriously, name a country and I can likely name a friend of mine that grew up there. I have spent a great deal of time talking with others about so many different cultures of the world. The guy you can sort of see behind me is Nils of Sweden.

This is a picture of one of my best friends and I hosting a group of our friends in Zürich. There are 5 different countries represented in this picture, 6 if you count Raphael for Brazil and Switzerland. Most of my time in Switzerland I lived in an International student dorm that held 169 people at a time. I was there for 2 semesters so I got to know countless people from everywhere in the world. Getting to know people from different cultures is one of my favorite things to do.

This is my lab setup here in Lincoln. I use it to test the special electronics I help design that allow us to take pictures of charged particles flying around in the CMS experiment. Last summer our experiment announced we had found a new particle! This was a exciting time for me. While I lived at CERN I worked on calibrating a special kind of detector called a calorimeter along a high energy beam line.The following are just a couple pictures I took in the building I worked in.

I look forward to getting to know all of you through this experience. I hope this was a good introduction to who I am.